1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to a charger having a battery diagnosis function and a method of driving the same, and more particularly, to a charger capable of diagnosing a state-of-health and an abnormal state of a battery and a method of driving the same.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Typically, a battery performs a discharge cycle for converting chemical energy into electrical energy and a charge cycle for converting electrical energy into chemical energy. A most common battery is a lead storage battery as an application of a galvanic battery, which is comprised of a sulfuric acid solution, a lead (Pb) electrode, and a lead dioxide (PbO2) electrode, and a state-of-health thereof is shortened due to many different kinds of aging process including variation in internal active materials and a self-discharge which is caused by repetitive charge and discharge cycles for a long time.
Meanwhile, the battery described above is periodically charged with electric power through a charger. Generally, such a charger is not provided with a function capable of diagnosing a status of a battery, aside from a battery charge function. As a result, a user can not recognize a state-of-health of a battery upon use of the battery to get a forecast regarding an inoperable state or an indication of malfunction of a system caused by the sudden drop of the battery's state-of-health, such that reliability of the system may be degraded.
To address such a problem, research on a charger capable of diagnosing the state-of-health of a battery upon charging the battery and informing a user of the diagnosis result have actively been conducted.
Calculating a maximum available capacity of a battery using a Coulomb coefficient thereof and on the basis of a parameter variation of a battery model, methods of diagnosing a state-of-health of a battery are representative.
The methods described above, however, are disadvantageous in that a diagnosis algorithm of a battery's state-of-health is both complicated and becoming less reliable.